The Last Days of Sound and Fury

Battering-ram six-string power and inescapable melody have long been the tools of Bob Mould's trade. Through the hostile punk punches of his HYsker DY days in the Eighties and the sublime soaring of his pop-leaning early-Nineties excursion with Sugar, Mould crafted a body of work that elevates the bone-pounding possibilities of sheer electrified sonic force while maintaining the very traditional artistic elements of rock and roll songwriting. His noisy hooks have both inspired and instructed so-called alternative icons like Kurt Cobain and Billy Corgan. More recently his fierce solo live performances even stirred the sleeping showman in a rock royal like Pete Townshend, leading him to take on the occasional solo acoustic performance, many of them benefits.

So why does Bob Mould want to hang up his electric guitar -- forever?
"I'll be real honest," the 37-year-old musician confesses. "Given my history in this business, I can't see a way to age gracefully, continuing to do what I call 'punk rock.' Given the high quality of what I've been doing, I've sort of set a standard for myself with my audience that will eventually be hard to live up to. Just the physical nature of the shows, the volume, the activity, the aggression. I don't feel all those things as strongly as I did fifteen years ago. I don't want to make a fool of myself, and I don't want to drag my audience to a place they don't need to go."

With the release of his fourth solo record, The Last Dog and Pony Show, Mould decided that his current four-month tour "will be the final time around with an electric band. Then I'll figure out other ways of performing live." This from a man whose ear-splitting, rib-rattling live shows were a talisman for his dedicated fans.

"A lot of career decisions I make are based on things I like and dislike as a music fan," Mould explains. "A real simple part of this is when I go out to see a night of punk rock, I can only stand up for about three hours. Then my back is killing me. I know how old my fans are, generally, and after three hours of standing on concrete, what do I want to do? Get the hell home and sit down," he laughs. "So I'm sort of following my own restrictions as well."

In addition to the legitimate fear of embarrassing himself as age takes a toll on his performing abilities, the guitarist has a distinct purpose for this final outing: "Over the past handful of years I've done acoustic shows, and they're more intimate. The thing I always hear after shows is 'I really wish I'd seen HYsker DY, I really wish I'd seen Sugar, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, I've never seen you with a band.' I know this is the last time around for me, so at the risk of being presumptuous, I just thought it would be best to announce to people that this is it. Here's your chance."

Such a declaration forces his hand. "There's part of that, too," he admits. "I knew when I made up my mind to lay down the law that it was as much for myself. I ingrained it."

Since the 1995 demise of Sugar, his last real band, Mould has been all about change. He moved from Austin to New York (the "roots just didn't take hold" he says of the Texas music capital), spent time working out some personal issues via therapy and songwriting (often one and the same for him), and limited his live performances severely, not only in number but in sound. He chose to play only solo acoustic sets -- just his voice and his ringing twelve-string. His 1997 solo release (an untitled affair later unofficially dubbed Hubcap by Mould himself) was a fairly dark documentation of the personal transitions he was going through. A "purge record," as Mould terms it. While there were certainly poignant and majestic moments on the disc ("Fort Knox, King Solomon," the telling "Deep Karma Canyon"), it was extremely claustrophobic in sound and often impenetrable in lyric. Unlike 1990's more accessible Black Sheets of Rain (there's a cheery title for you), Hubcap was insular, grudging, and light on hooks.

The more inviting Dog and Pony Show is a less strictly personal work, with Mould turning his attention outward and avoiding the self-pity that marred his previous disc. In fact, this new one is the hill beyond "Deep Karma Canyon."

"There's an obvious pattern," says Mould. "Workbook up, Black Sheets down, Copper Blue up, Beaster down, File Under: Easy Listening up, Hubcap down. I see it now, but I don't know it when I'm writing. It's the oscillations of life. Knock on wood, my oscillations stay years apart. The thing I remind myself every day is that I'm so lucky to have a long-enough career to see that. Especially in this day and age.

"The last two records are so indicative of what kind of impact geographical placement has on me," he continues. "I think with any writer worth their salt, your environment is paramount to what you're doing."